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China in numbers: secondhand view with salutary warning

Leo Lewis

November 12 2013, 12:01am, The Times

Singles Day in Shanghai, a day for the lovelorn and, increasingly, the bargain loverEugene Hoshiko /AP

3,000km . . . is the combined length of bargain-price underpants (if laid end-to-end) sold on Chinese websites between midnight on Sunday and 1am on Monday morning. If all the cut-price bras sold in the same period were piled on top of one another, the resulting pillar of lingerie would be three times the height of Mount Everest.

In those first, financially incontinent 60 minutes of Monday morning, China’s largest handler of online payments took 25 million orders with a combined value of 6.7 billion yuan (£686 million). About 340,000 of those orders were placed in the first minute. It was as if the world were about to end and China suddenly decided that the only hope of salvation lay in half-price knickers.